[Alan Okey]

[Phil Hoppes] “MacPro’s represent a laughable insignificant portion of Apple’s revenue. Giving it way more than it deserves it can’t be more than 20k to 30k units a year. Assume an ASP of 5K which again is far too much on the high side an you get 100M – 150M. The last FY reports put Apple’s annual revenue at 109B dollars. That is a whopping 0.14% of annual revenue. Apple’s revenue is continuing to go up and MacPro revenue is going down so you have a product line that represents 0.14% of your annual revenue and it is rapidly approaching negative zero.

Do you really have to ask WHY Apple would want to keep this product line around? Come on really?”

Glad to see someone gets it.

[Alan Okey]

While I dislike the facts, I understand the situation completely from a business perspective. Apple simply can’t keep investing in hardware that offers them so little return on investment. GPU drivers alone have proven to be too overwhelming for Apple, even when they still cared about towers. The numbers just aren’t there for Apple to justify continuing the development and support of hardware that accounts for such a negligible portion of their sales and profits. Xserve RAID and Xserve were perfect examples of this reality.

Things may have been different before the iPhone and iPad, when “high end” users still counted for something in terms of public mindshare (Hollywood credits, etc.) but clearly Apple no longer needs that kind of attention to be successful. Complex, expensive products purchased by a niche user base simply don’t figure prominently in Apple’s future.

[Alan Okey]

I won’t reveal my sources, but like Shane said, I have heard from reputable people at reputable companies that deal directly with Apple.

The iMac is going to be the new high-end machine in Apple’s lineup. No new Mac Pro, no replacement “other” product.

[Alan Okey]

What type of editing would you ultimately like to be doing?

[Alan Okey]

I think it’s way too soon to include FCP X as a “must-learn” app in the company of the other apps you’ve mentioned, at least as far as employability at larger facilities goes. As Shane Ross said, it all depends on your focus. If you’re looking for employment in the film/broadcast sector, save yourself the $300 and skip FCP X, or at least don’t expect it to give you any kind of competitive advantage in that market.

[Alan Okey]

I think Apple is ahead of the curve in its focus on metadata, but I seriously doubt that the trackless editing paradigm of FCP X is going to become a widely adopted industry standard, especially in the broadcast/film editing market.

[Alan Okey]

Regardless of FCP X’s merits, it’s important to recognize that it has a very unique editing methodology. If you are just starting out and wish to be employable, you can’t do better than Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro 7 or Premiere Pro, which all use a track-based editing paradigm. Knowledge of FCP X will be far less transferrable than that of any of these other applications due to its non-standard interface. The sad truth is, most employers won’t even tolerate ignorance of the specific editing application that they use, even if you have learned something with a similar editing methodology.

[Alan Okey]

Honestly, guys, Apple is just Over It. You “pro” users are too small of a niche, and too big of a pain in the ass to bother with anymore. The iMac is the new high end of Apple hardware. Get used to it, or abandon ship and embrace your new Windows overlords.

[Alan Okey]

[Ryan Holmes] “Someone who has experience with them in this capacity could chime in. If it was my money, Drobo would not be my first choice for a video editing RAID.”

You are correct, Drobos are a poor choice for an editing RAID. There are plenty of older posts on this forum detailing why this is the case.

[Alan Okey]

[Ryan Holmes] “RAID 5 will provide speed but no redundancy (i.e. mirroring). “

RAID-5 stripes data and parity across all drives in the set, so it’s possible to lose one drive in a RAID-5 volume without data loss. It’s not a substitute for real backups, but RAID-5 does provide fault tolerance, unlike RAID-0 which is data striped across all drives in the set with no parity.